


melinoë

by lonelyghosts



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abuse, Character Study, Gen, Ginny Weasley Doesn't Forget, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, lots of comparisons to greek myth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 11:04:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10535163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: Ginny Weasley goes into the Chamber of Secrets and comes out nowhere near whole.A character study of Ginny Weasley after the Chamber of Secrets.





	

Ginny will never be able to forget. None of it. Not a single detail, not a single second. All of it, everything, seared behind her eyelids when she sleeps like a reminder. This is what you did, they say, this is what you are. 

All of it- the nightmares. The bloodstained robes and chicken feathers, the heaving confusion of having white blanks in her memory. The shaking fear that crept into the back of her mind. 

The death march to her watery grave. 

She will never forget it. Not a single, terrible, nightmarish second of it. Not waking to a boy with black hair covered in thick red blood and greasy dark grime, green eyes shining bright in the gloom- not the sword he carried, either, or the basilisk fang he held tightly in his fist. She is Melinoë, child of Hades, goddess of spirits, and she houses Tom's ghost even after the exorcism. 

(Harry helps her up, and they pick their way through the fallen rocks around them in this crumbling Chamber. She holds his hand so tightly, and it is warm in a way that nothing has been for a very long time.

Later she sits in the infirmary, and she feels the thoughts thrum in her head.  _The ordeal is not over_ , she thinks, and weeps.)

She sees Tom in every inkblot, every handsome boy, every smirk. She finds his words in textbooks and finds herself in freefall. She sees him around every corner, every moment, every half-second. Every nightmare. He is a ghost, a spirit, formless, no more than memory, but she is Melinoë. There is nowhere that she can hide from him. 

Ginny Weasley went in the Chamber of Secrets as the smallest child of an aging bloodline. She went in naive and open-hearted and came out draped in a cloak of fear, with her own dark secrets buried behind her eyelids, stains she can't wash out. 

She goes in Hestia, maiden of the home, and comes out as Persephone, queen of the Underworld, hands stained with purple pomegranate juice, sticky in between her fingers. She cannot scrub the stains from her fingers. She cannot wash the taste from her mouth.

Because Ginny Weasley ate the pomegranate, the silly little girl, and she gave up half her life to the darkness.

Only instead of giving up her winters, she gave up parts of her heart and watched them crumble to dust. She gave up her nights, and she found him in every dream, a smirking, deadly monster of a boy, lurking in every corner, every dark place in her mind.

She did not sleep- or rather, she did not dream. That was her punishment. 

It matters not that she was an eleven-year-old puppet, because she is just as deadly as the puppeteer. There is no apologizing for Tom, and there is no apology she can give for what she did. The darkness took her into itself and caressed her, and she loved it. How could she not? She was last child of a crumbling house with nothing but its scarce love left- no nobility, no money, no honor. She had nothing but her mother's soft love, and she left that on the windowshelf of the Burrow. When the darkness promised her every dream, she said yes. 

Who is to say that she will not take the gifts again one day?

She came back Persephone, and Persephone was a goddess of the Underworld herself, a monstrous queen by the winter cold. Persephone ruled in the Underworld too. The song-screams of Sisyphus and Tantalus and the tortured souls from the Fields of Punishment- Persephone heard them day by day, night by night. They were music to her ears, this traitorous, tyrant black queen. Persephone was a woman, and Ginny knew that women went mad just as easily and as terribly as everyone else. She had seen Bellatrix's laughing face. She had felt the roaring in her own ears, the giggling in her heart. It was quite easy to go mad, here in this world of dreams and blood and nightmares, and Ginny felt like she was always walking the line. 

Who is to say she will not wake one day with blood trickling down her chin, thick and hot in her mouth? Who is to say she won't go mad and enjoy it? She was already deadly at eleven, after all. Tom held her close and used her as his own sword. She slashed apart a school in his hands. She had red in her ledger, blood that she will pay for.

Hermione’s. Colin’s, Penelope’s. Justin’s. In a way, Harry’s.

It is so simple for all of them to forget her sins. They can forget easy and forgive easier. The stains that streak across her body are underneath the skin, and they cannot see them. There is ink on her palms, her fingertips, ink she can't scrub out with a thousand showers, though she tried. She is marred by it- skin slashed with a black inkbrush, stark and broken, stretching across her life and seeping into every waking, sleeping, living moment.

Harry understands- that's the strange thing for her, that he understands. You wouldn't know it to look at him. He radiates light in the corridors, a Golden Boy, apple of Dumbledore's eye.

The year after the Chamber, she avoids him- she's afraid to stain him with her dark, stained hands. But they both have something so dark inside of them, something ugly and twisted that lurks deep below the surface, something they hate bitterly. They both burn bright, impulsive, a light to look to by day. They both have their villain’s black fingerprints- Ginny's on her spine, Harry's on his forehead. 

She could have seen it earlier. It's just that he forgets it all so easy. For her? There is no forgetting.

She was a carefree, naive, foolish little girl once, and that was when she forgot- her father's advice, her mother's warning, forgotten for a silly fancy of a dark-haired boy with green eyes. Forgetting wreaked Voldemort’s havoc for him. There is no forgetting that Ginevra Weasley lies unburied in the chamber. There is no bringing her back, not really.

The Chamber took some things from her. Ginny Weasley got clawed back and found her innocence taken away, dark fear held in the curve of her neck where it had been. It was bone-white and as vulnerable as a jugular vein beating in her throat. It was as vulnerable as she, with her trembling hands, her wet eyes, her ever-present fear of black books and diaries. 

(When she saw her new little black textbook for second-year Potions she burst out crying, heaving breaths. The dark fear crept its way up her curved throat and found a spot in the back of her mouth. It tasted like bile).

Ginny Weasley comes back with two ghosts in her spine- Tom Riddle's taunting poltergeist and her own fragile self. She is Melinoë, goddess of spirits, Persephone's daughter. She hears her own dead self speak. She isn't sure of whether she can trust her own heartbeat.

Sometimes, she thinks she died there, in the Chamber. She walked down, down, down- down to her watery grave. She laid herself down in her own coffin and she slept at last. 

 

She wonders if she came back. If she ever could've come back. 

* * *

Near the end of her fourth year she figures out that she came back with things stolen from her. She is not surprised- after all, there are bigger miracles in this land of black magic and dreams. There are bigger nightmares here, in a world of blood and ripped flesh, than coming back with parts missing.

Ginevra Weasley went down and came up with things lost. She lost her full name. She lost her shoes- they still sit in the Chamber, waiting for her to come back.

Ginny Weasley lost her heart down there.

But she came back with courage, and that was her gift.

She came back with a courage so strong that it would knock you down to face her. She was tough, even then. Not tough enough to claw her way back herself, no, but she's been doing it every night, ever since, and that's the kind of courage that blasts you back with the fierceness. That sort of thing will give a girl blood-red lips and her own sharp-eyed, daring mischief, half of it stolen from Fred and George and half of it made with the spark of her own bright palms.

Ginny brings it all back- every flicker, every flame- and holds it tight.

Courage is some small and shattered pyrrhic prize for her troubles, but it's a prize still, and almost a worthy one. She endured Tom Riddle's whispered words, sweet fiction lies that teased their way into her brain- what is a sneering blonde Slytherin compared to that? What is the terrible Sirius Black to the one the students whisper that he swore fealty to?

She went down to her own watery grave and came back bearing a ruby-jeweled sword to shine in the light of the dawn, rising over her head. She was a damsel once, a princess, saved by a prince. But she was the one who weathered the dragon's fire, and that is what made her a knight.

She has the sword of Gryffindor now, and she carries with her a lioness, one who sleeps quietly in the back of her mind, one with sharp claws. It fights away the handsome boy who lurks with it, fights away the darkness. 

She comes back, this time. This time, she has something to hold on to- a sword, a castle, the first hand that has felt warm in a long time, and it is the first stone, the first foundation in a long line. The first time, she dies in water and ashes and darkness, and she comes back with flaming red hair and blazing brown eyes.

She comes back something her mother will always love and never fully understand. She will scrub out the ghosts, the madness, the dark fingerprints. She is becoming Eos, now, she is dawning over a new era where she will fight every monster and win every prize and her hair will be the color of the sunrise. 

Someday, she can scrub out Melinoë and Persephone. Someday she can replace them with Diana, with Bastet, with Freya. Someday she'll become a goddess that lives, that dances in the sunlight and makes no apology for her fiery tongue, a girl who does not break at the hands of men with dark hair and pretty eyes. A girl who is not broken.

She will not forget- she never will- but that's okay. She has something to avenge now, something to live for.  

Tom told her he owned all of her- her body, her mind, her heart, her magic. Ginny will prove him wrong. 

 


End file.
